Isegoria

When I first heard of Netflix’s Queen’s Gambit — which I still haven’t watched, despite hearing good things — it never occurred to me that it was based on a 40-year-old book — one that does not describe its protagonist as anything like Audrey Hepburn playing chess, by the way. What actually jumped out at me about the book, beyond its mere existence, was the author, Walter Tevis. I immediately recognized the name but couldn’t quite place it.

Tevis wrote the science-fiction classic, Mockingbird, which I’ve been meaning to read — and which just showed up on Tor’s list of Golden Age and New Wave SF classics that should be adapted right now, in the wake of Dune and Foundation‘s film and TV adaptations:

The novel is in conversation with classics like 1984 but is built on a reversal of empowering people through the power of books and literature. The high-concept, post-apocalyptic setting and narrative would make for great set pieces and visuals. Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler has a knack for rich, compelling characters and his work is ripe for adaptation. Given the recent success of Netflix’s adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit and the buzz over Showtime’s upcoming The Man Who Fell to Earth series makes this a perfect time to adapt the Nebula-nominated Mockingbird as well.

The new Eternals film is a reminder that, while he may not be widely recognized as such, Jack Kirby is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century:

His signature style — a fusion of pivotal artistic movements such as cubism, expressionism, surrealism, avant-garde, op art, indigenous South American, midcentury commercial and futurism, blended into a visual language all his own — and innovation in composition, dynamism and design, can be found today in virtually all forms of visual media and art, from film to advertising to photography.

Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917 to Jewish immigrants from Austria who lived in New York’s Lower East Side tenements and eked out a living in a garment factory. A Pratt Institute dropout at 14, he found success early on when he and studio partner Joe Simon created Captain America for Timely Comics in 1941, reportedly selling almost a million copies a month. His hyperkinetic, hyper-stylized, hyper-everything art seemed barely contained by the page, helping define the nascent art form and establish the superhero genre and comic book industry.

When superheroes’ popularity waned after the war, the versatile Kirby made an indelible mark on a variety of other genres, including western, horror, space adventure and giant monsters. His rampaging behemoths paralleled the rise of creature features like “Them!” in the US and kaiju films like “Godzilla” in Japan, helping make them a lasting genre. But it was teen romance, of all things, that he influenced the most; together with Simon he created “Young Romance” for Prize Comics in 1947, a runaway hit that surpassed a million copies monthly and inspired nearly a hundred copycat series. Breaking with the Archie Comics mold, it introduced Shakespearean melodrama to youth entertainment, a revolution that’s evident in today’s numerous teen shows on TV.

Just as Kirby helped define superhero comics in the 1940s, he helped redefine them in the 1960s. Timely was now called Marvel, and his and Simon’s former office assistant was now the editor-in-chief and head writer, Stan Lee. Lee brought Kirby on for what became an unprecedented, and unsurpassed by either, period of manic creativity. They created together the Fantastic Four (1961), the Hulk (1962), Thor (1962), Ant-Man (1962), Iron Man (1963), Avengers (1963), X-Men (1963), Silver Surfer (1966), Black Panther (1966) and hundreds of other heroes, villains, cast and concepts. Kirby also played a role in the creation of Spider-Man in 1962 and Daredevil in 1964 and auteured solo properties like the Eternals.

More than just a new pantheon, they created a whole new approach. They recast monsters as outcast heroes and added the drama of teen romance, appealing more to high school and college readers. Their stories had greater realism and deeper characterization, featuring heroes with relatable faults and action informed by Kirby’s youth in a street gang and combat experience as an infantry scout in France, for which he received the Bronze Star. Marvel came to be known as “The House of Ideas,” Lee as “Stan the Man” and Kirby as “King of Comics.”

Kirby also created much of the mythology for the other big publisher in comics, DC. His radical “Fourth World” saga, a magnum opus spinning off Superman into four series from 1970 to 1973, was a grand space opera about warring alien gods. It introduced Darkseid (pronounced “dark side”), a towering, imperious villain who commands the mechanized war planet of Apokolips in a quest for galactic conquest. Opposing him is his own son Orion, raised by the noble gods to be their champion, who struggles with his dark heritage and nature. Their religion and source of power is a metaphysical life force called, simply, “the Source.”

Four years later “Star Wars” was released, featuring strikingly similar concepts like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, the Dark Side, the Death Star, and the Force. Vader also resembles Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four villain Dr. Doom, who hides his horrific burn scars under high-tech armor.

[…]

In 1979, he was commissioned to create concept art for a big-screen adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s science fiction novel, “Lord of Light” (ironically, spurred by the success of “Star Wars”).

The same producer also hired him to design an entire theme park in Colorado called Science Fiction Land. Neither would come to fruition, but Kirby’s art found an even better purpose. The CIA used it for its mock production of the film “Argo,” a now-famous covert operation for the rescue of US embassy members from Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis.

In the spring of 1984, the American Booksellers Association held its annual convention in Washington, and Washington Post critic Michael Dirda was there:

One evening, Book World — The Washington Post’s then stand-alone literary supplement — hosted a cocktail party on the roof of the paper’s now demolished headquarters at 15th and L streets NW. As I wandered around, doing my feeble best to be sociable, I noticed one gentleman standing alone, looking a bit overwhelmed but also vaguely familiar. It was Frank Herbert, whom I didn’t at first recognize because he had recently shaved off his iconic beard.

At that point I simply abandoned my attempts at glad-handing. Over the next hour Herbert and I sat in the fading sunshine and talked and talked, though only a little about “Dune” because our conversation kept drifting back to Jack Vance, Herbert’s good friend and probably the most imaginative world-builder in postwar science fiction. That conversation led me to suspect that “Dune” was, in part, Herbert’s attempt to rival Vance by envisioning every aspect of an alien civilization, including its people’s clothing, cultural traditions and religious rituals.

[…]

As a hotshot young editor back in 1984, I didn’t allow many weeks to go by before phoning my new buddy to see if he would review a book. Given that David Lynch’s then much-anticipated film of “Dune” hadn’t yet been released but was already in the news, I asked Herbert to write about a splashy, comparably promoted fantasy novel, Stephen King and Peter Straub’s “The Talisman.” In the end, he didn’t much like it, not that this mattered. Just getting Herbert to review it was a minor coup and we featured his piece on the front of Book World.

[…]

As a novel, “Dune” has never been unconditionally admired. I know sophisticated readers, devoted science fiction fans, who can’t stand it, finding Herbert’s prose inept, the action ponderous, and the whole book clumsy and tedious. But sf readers are contentious, often cruelly so, and nearly all of the field’s most beloved novels and series also have cogent and vocal detractors: Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy is dismissed as period pulp; Robert A. Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” preach either militaristic jingoism or pretentious ’60s claptrap; Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren” is well nigh unreadable and Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” too subtle, too theological, too clever by half. Perhaps so. Yet imaginative works that people still argue about — and “Dune” certainly belongs in this category — demonstrate their continuing vitality and relevance. They remain — to borrow a vogue phrase — part of the conversation.

For Hollywood, it is a golden age of intellectual property, Peter Suderman says, which is to say it is a golden age of adaptation:

Seemingly every beloved genre story from the last century has been optioned and auctioned, put into development, and often produced with lavish budgets and production in hopes that this old favorite will become the next Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, or, if one is really dreaming big — and who in Hollywood isn’t? — Star Wars or Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hollywood’s hit-makers have dug deep into the post-war canon of beloved adolescent fantasies: If someone in America was ever obsessed with a story as a 12-year-old, it’s probably being made into a movie or TV show right now.

If there is something missing from this bounty of adaptable IP, it’s classic science fiction. Although there have been scattered attempts to adapt the Golden Age masters — Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke — and their many literary successors in the half century since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, few of these efforts have made much impact. (Remember Will Smith’s I, Robot? That’s what I thought.)

[...]

Part of the problem is that these sci-fi stories tend to be challenging to adapt: They operate at a level of scale and socio-scientific complexity that is difficult to fit into the demands of a mainstream feature-film format, or even a prestige TV series. Classic sci-fi is thinky, intricate, idiosyncratic, and sprawling in a way that so far has largely resisted successful big-screen treatment. The best of it is almost too big for the big screen.

It is with a combination of joy and relief that he declares Villeneuve’s Dune the real deal:

It is a love letter to a science fiction classic, and, in a way, to all the classics of science fiction. It is a no-compromises future-fantasy epic that operates at a scale I’ve never quite seen before. I’ve already bought tickets to see it again.

[...]

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is half a masterpiece in a long-neglected genre, and half a science fiction masterpiece is far better than nothing at all.

With the new Dune movie about to come out, I started reading one of the books that inspired it, Lesley Blanch’s 1960 novel, The Sabres of Paradise, a book I’ve discussed before:

Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”

Herbert is ecumenical with his borrowing, lifting terminology and rituals from both sides of this obscure Central Asian conflict. When Paul Atreides, Dune’s youthful protagonist, is adopted by a desert tribe whose rituals and feuds bear a marked resemblance to the warrior culture of the Islamic Caucasus, he lives at the exotically named Sietch Tabr. Sietch and tabr are both words for camp borrowed from the Cossacks, the Czarist warrior caste who would become the great Christian antagonists of Shamyl’s Islamic holy warriors.

Herbert also lifted two of Dune’s most memorable lines directly from Blanch. While describing the Caucasians’ fondness for swordplay, Blanch writes, “To kill with the point lacked artistry.” In Dune, this becomes “[k]illing with the tip lacks artistry,” advice given to a young Paul Atreides by a loquacious weapons instructor. A Caucasian proverb recorded by Blanch transforms into a common desert aphorism. “Polish comes from the city, wisdom from the hills,” an apt saying for a mountain people, becomes “Polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert” in Dune.

Dune’s narrative, however, owes more to The Sabres of Paradise than just terminology and customs. The story of a fiercely independent, religiously inspired people resisting an outside power is certainly not unique to the Caucasus, but Blanch’s influence can be found here, too. The name of Herbert’s major villain, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, is redolent of Russian imperialism. Meanwhile, Imam Shamyl, the charismatic leader of Islamic resistance in the Caucasus, describes the Russian Czar as “Padishah” and his provincial governor as “Siridar,” titles that Herbert would later borrow for Dune’s galactic emperor and his military underlings.

The introduction to the novel uses “Caucasian” literally, in its original sense, to unintentionally comedic effect:

The Caucasians wrote love poems to their daggers, as to a mistress and went to battle, as to a rendez-vous. Fighting was life itself to these darkly beautiful people — the most beautiful people in the world, it was said. They lived and died by the dagger. Battle-thrusts were the pulse of the race. Vengeance was their creed, violence their climate.

[...]

The baby prince Georghi Melikov, at an age when he might have been sucking his thumb, was running it over the blade of his kindjal, or two-edged dagger, lisping that it had been made for him by Mourtazali the celebrated armourer.

[...]

Severed enemy heads or hands were always good coinage in the Caucasus. A Tousheen girl’s dowry was reckoned in these trophies. The more dashing a young Caucasian delikan, or brave, the more severed hands dangled from his saddle bow. Right hands, of course; left hands hardly counted and the loss of one never stopped a Caucasian from fighting. Sliced-off ears, a less cumbersome method of indicating the number of heads taken, were usually strung along the whip thong. When one Chechen chieftain found his son dead of wounds, he cut his body into sixty pieces and sent out horsemen across the mountains and valleys, each with a fragment, to be given to his kinsmen and vassals. For each piece, an enemy head was returned. Thus was his son’s death avenged. Vengeance, vendetta or kanly, was often pursued through three or four generations, decimating whole families, till there was no-one left. A household was only reckoned poor, only pitied, when there was no-one fit to fight.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I read Dune, and it didn’t really work for me, but I did find it oddly compelling, and I think back to it more than I would have expected.

At the very least, it will teach you how to overthrow an empire and launch a new religion.

Ayn Rand pretty much failed as a philosopher, Michael Huemer says, but she was a brilliant novelist:

Most literature buffs disagree with this; indeed, most would probably say Rand was a terrible novelist. I think the reason for this is not that Rand was objectively terrible, but rather that the overwhelming majority of literature fans (especially, e.g., students and professors of literature) fall within a certain range of tastes, which are connected to their general personality traits. This is a selection effect, i.e., only people with a certain psychology choose to become literature experts.

Rand intentionally wrote a particular kind of novel, which literature people happen not to like; thus, no matter how good the novels are within that category, most literature people will hate them.

And what category was that? You might call it “the propaganda novel” (where “propaganda” is of course used in a purely descriptive sense, not as a term of abuse). They are novels designed to advance a philosophical worldview, and to do so in a clear, forceful, and (to those who might be receptive to that worldview) inspiring manner. They are not subtle, nor are they supposed to be. They are supposed to dramatize Ayn Rand’s worldview.

Leaving aside (for now) the question of whether Rand’s worldview is right, is this a worthy goal for a novel? Well, consider all the novels whose central goal is to provoke a feeling of horror (horror novels), or wonder (science fiction and fantasy), or excitement (action novels). Communicating one’s philosophy is at least as worthwhile and reasonable as those goals. Whether this counts as “literature” or not is neither here nor there.

Given that this is in principle a worthwhile thing to do, and given that that is the type of novel Rand set out to write, her works have to be judged by the standards of that genre. By those standards, she succeeds about as well as anyone has ever done. Can you think of another novel that has created as many devoted followers of a philosophical movement as Atlas Shrugged?

Many people would like to do what Ayn Rand did — many would like to communicate their ideas to people all over the world, and many would like to write bestsellers. Some of the world’s smartest people have tried to do those things. Almost none of them can do it. If you or I try to do what Rand did, we will not succeed. So let’s admit that Rand had an exceptional talent for that kind of writing.

That said, I understand very well what some people hate about her writing. It is very heavy handed, black-and-white, and often angry and deliberately insulting towards people with different ideas. These characteristics, however, are part of how Rand succeeded. If she had communicated her ideas in a manner that most literature fans would like, then you would have never heard of her and we wouldn’t be talking about her now.

Rand’s most subtle novel, by the way, was her first: We the Living. It is the only of her works that features a socialist character who has integrity. It’s also far less popular than her more propagandistic novels.

In sum: Ayn Rand set out to do something that is in principle worthwhile, that hardly anyone is capable of doing, and she succeeded better than just about anyone ever has. That requires enormous talent.

I haven’t watched Netflix’s Queen’s Gambit, but I’ve heard good things. It never occurred to me that it was based on a 40-year-old book — which does not describe its protagonist as looking like the show’s star, Anya Taylor-Joy:

Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard. The next day her picture appeared in the Herald-Leader. The photograph, taken on the porch of the gray house on Maplewood Drive, showed Beth in a simple cotton frock. Even then, she was clearly plain. A legend under the picture read: “Orphaned by yesterday’s pile-up on New Circle Road, Elizabeth Harmon surveys a troubled future. Elizabeth, eight, was left without family by the crash, which killed two and injured others. At home alone at the time, Elizabeth learned of the accident shortly before the photo was taken. She will be well looked after, authorities say.”

In the Methuen Home in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Beth was given a tranquilizer twice a day. So were all the other children, to “even their dispositions.” Beth’s disposition was all right, as far as anyone could see, but she was glad to get the little pill. It loosened something deep in her stomach and helped her doze away the tense hours in the orphanage.

Mr. Fergussen gave them the pills in a little paper cup. Along with the green one that evened the disposition, there were orange and brown ones for building a strong body. The children had to line up to get them.